


Moonshadow and Clutching Branches

by PrettyArbitrary



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Fae & Fairies, M/M, Wishes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-09 02:20:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8871865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary
Summary: It's heading toward sunset, not that it needs to be very late for that at this time of year, and the shadows under the trees become increasingly blue as he goes.  The snow changes the landscape so that instead of the woods he grew up in, Jack passes through an unexplored new world. With it still coming down, his are the first human footprints to break the fresh blanket of white.  He feels like the first person to ever walk here.This is where Jack will get his dearest wish granted.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A Secret Santa fanfic for buckybuns.tumblr.com!
> 
> A special thanks and shout-out to boxeption, sourbluefreezy and joasakura, who betaed, inspired and provided the best joke in the fic, respectively.

Jack slams the screen door open and all but tumbles down the steps of the back porch while he’s still pulling on his coat. He sinks shin deep in the snow when he hits the ground, and keeps right on going toward the woods that edge the back of the yard.

“Oh, come on, Jack, it's snowing!” his mother calls from inside, voice rising mournfully over the background noise of his dad’s growly complaining.

“I'll be back later!” Jack roars over his shoulder. He knows he sounds rude and angry and he doesn’t care. 

The snow makes his steps clumsy, but he refuses to slow down till he's out of sight of the house, plunging into the shadowy grotto the snow has made of the trail opening into their wooded acreage.

They don't want him to enlist. They want him to stay. _“It's not safe, Jack, the military is for people who don't have other options.”_ Well, what they don't seem to get is that if he doesn't get out of this place, he’ll die. He can’t stay here his whole damn life or mid-state Indiana is going to bury him alive, one shovel of dirt at a time.

It's heading toward sunset, not that it needs to be very late for that at this time of year, and the shadows under the trees become increasingly blue as he goes. The snow changes the landscape so that instead of the woods he grew up in, Jack passes through an unexplored new world. With it still coming down, his are the first human footprints to break the fresh blanket of white. He feels like the first person to ever walk here.

He likes it. It feels mysterious, dangerous, exciting. He feels like he belongs here more than he ever has in Bloomington. A not-insignificant part of him wishes that this could be his reality. After the holidays are over, he's going to enlist, no matter what his parents say, and in a few years he's going to come back and use that money to go to college. Maybe a degree in physics or engineering, and then he could try out to be an astronaut. Chances are good humans will go to other worlds in his lifetime, and then maybe he really could walk on some wild, unexplored planet and leave the first human footsteps.

“You've got big dreams, kid,” a hoarse voice says from the shadows of an overhung thicket. “I like that.”

Jack spins. For a second, all he sees is deep violet shadow and twiggy, clutching branches in a young sassafras thicket. Then it moves forward and a man’s dark, handome face resolves out of the smudge. “Hey, there. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

Jack blinks at him a couple of times, taken aback. He hadn’t been expecting to meet anybody out here. For that matter, he’s never seen this man before and this is a hell of a weird place to find a total stranger. “Uh, hey. Um, what are you doing on our property?”

The man laughs. “This isn't your property, kid.” He waves a hand around. “Does any of this look familiar to you?”

Jack looks around and is shocked to realize that the man is right. He must have been really deep in his head to end up this far out of his way, because he doesn't recognize any of these trees or landmarks. Maybe it's the snow, because if anyone asked him, Jack would have said it wasn’t even possible for him to get lost in these woods.

The man watches confusion evolve on Jack's face and smiles, a sly slash like he’s got a secret joke. “It’s fine, kid. I'm sure you'll find your way back. It’s not like these woods are that big. But hey. Before you go, any chance I could trouble you for a smoke?”

“I, uh. I don’t smoke.” Jack’s pretty sure that would be a better lie if he hadn’t just caught himself reaching around to tuck the crumpled pack deeper into his back pocket, where his shirt tails keep it hidden from his parents. He promised them he’d quit. In his defense, he hasn’t bought a pack since graduation. A friend’s sister gave him the remnants of this one, and he’s been hoarding them.

The man laughs again, teeth flashing as white as the snow around them, and leans back against a tree about five feet away from Jack. “Sure, sunshine. That's why you smell like a trash fire.”

Jack can feel his face heating up. God, hopefully the windburn hides that. “Fine. God. Here.” He pulls the battered pack out and taps out a little white stick to pass it over, along with his tiny book of matches. He taps his fingers against his thigh a couple of times, nettled over a stranger accusing him of smelling bad when the guy smells like he’s spent a couple nights hanging out behind the Circle K himself. "At least I don't smell like someone's burning a bag of...what is that? Old hot dogs?"

The guy glares at him, both hands nearly to his mouth. "That's _chestnuts,_ you cultureless ass."

The man’s pissed, but there’s an amused tilt to his scowl. Jack grins unrepentantly at him, pleased at his reaction and the way it makes his eyes sparkle, then thinks better of it and squints in confusion. "You smell like burning chestnuts? Why?"

“Roasting chestnuts! Holy shit, kid!” He sticks the cigarette in his mouth and then his face lights up orange as he strikes the match. “How do they teach you people to celebrate the winter holidays these days?"

He inhales without waiting for an answer, the end of the cigarette glowing a cheery red as it catches and burns back. Jack watches him breathe out a long stream of smoke. “You can’t really smell it on me, can you?” he finally asks nervously. God, have his parents been able to tell this whole time and they’ve just been waiting to close the trap?

“To me you smell like an ashtray,” the man says, and then turns his head to exhale another cloud. “But then I’ve got a good nose. I doubt they can tell.”

Jack nods absently in relief, then tenses. “Wait. Them who?”

“Your parents.” The man flicks ash to the ground. “The reason you’ve been out here brooding, in between dreaming of adventure and glory. Adventure is a dangerous thing to wish for, Jack.” The man meets Jack’s eyes squarely for the first time. “You sure that’s the road you want to go down?”

“I didn’t tell you my name,” Jack says slowly, feeling like he has to hunt for the words and assemble them manually. The landscape around them still doesn’t look like anyplace he’s familiar with. This tract of woods should only be a few square miles. He’s been everywhere in it. “And I didn’t say anything about my parents.”

“Not out loud, no. You figuring out I’m not human, yet?”

Now that he’s looking straight at Jack, his eyes are tiny pale moons hanging in the starlit black of a twin pair of skies, and Jack wonders how he missed that before.

Part of him registers that it’s creepy as hell, but everything he wants is in there. Endless horizons and unfathomable risks and impossible things. _Adventure_ is such a small word for craving an untamed world, for the opportunity to find out if he’s enough, to be stripped down through his layers and tested until he finds out the truth of what he is. 

Nothing in his quiet hometown will ever do that, he knows. If he never leaves, he’ll grow old and die suffocating in the folds of his own bullshit. But this. _This._

The man tilts his head. Where shadow falls across his face, his features lose human skin tone and become the purple and silver of moonshadow and scratching branches. “You know what I am?”

Jack shakes his head. He obviously something...else. Magic. Jack didn’t believe in magic till one minute ago, but he can feel it in his bones now.

“Ever heard of the Unseelie Court?” He grunts when Jack shakes his head again. “Look it up when you get home. What matters to you, right now, is that in the right circumstances, I grant favors. Wishes, like I said. For example, in return for a kindness done for me.” He holds the remnant of the cigarette up between two knuckles, and then flicks the ash off it again. “You’ve got one true wish in your heart, kid. But before I grant it, I’ll warn you right now: you don’t understand what you’re asking for.”

Jack should be prudent here. He’s read stories. Nobody’s ever prudent in stories, and it fucks them up. _But._ He watches the man’s elegant long fingers curl around his face, skin flickering between copper brown and moonlit violet as he brings the cigarette back to his lips for another drag. “Do you know what it's like to grow up on a farm in a dying economy, chestnut? It sucks. I don’t know what’ll happen if I get it, but I’ve got a good idea what’ll happen if I don’t.”

The man...thing...guy stares at him for a moment. It occurs to Jack that he hasn’t really seen him blink. Then his head ticks sideways in a sort of nod. “You’ve got a point. Okay.” He points over Jack’s shoulder. “You can get back if you head that way. Just don’t let your tracks cross over your old ones and you’ll be fine.”

Jack twists to look over his shoulder. He doesn’t see anything special: just dark, snowy trees and his own footprints. But when he looks back, the man is gone, only the scent of tobacco smoke and roasting chestnuts hanging around to prove he was there.

His parents are going to be flipping out by now anyway. He turns and starts for home. 

As he passes the first tree, something swats him across the back of the head. “See you soon, Jack. And don’t call me ‘chestnut.’”

***

A part of Jack has tried for the past four years to convince himself the encounter the woods that day was a dream, but he’s never been able to. Every detail of it is branded into his memory, more real than real, along with the knowledge, which should worry him but doesn’t, that the world is a far weirder place than he can ever explain. 

Whether or not the fairy—he looked it up, just like he was told to—ever kept his promise, Jack doesn’t know, but he’s certainly had his share of adventures since then. War, raids, rescues, Special Forces, mercy missions, training programs he thought he’d never escape alive. And now here he is in the SEP, one of one hundred people in the whole damn world crazy enough to see if he’s got what it takes to become “more than human.”

When he walks into the lecture hall to meet his assigned mentor from the program’s first cohort, he realizes that phrase might be more literal than he was expecting. One of the other soldiers from his group staggers into Jack’s back with a grunt when he stops in the middle of the aisle. 

“Holy shit. Chestnut? Is that you?”

There’s tittering from their fellow program recruits, and a couple of whispered, disbelieving repetitions of “chestnut!” from the SEP vets grouped in the front of the room.  
“Goddammit, Jack, I told you to cut that shit out.” It’s him, alright. Jack would know that grumpy-amused glower anywhere. “It’s _Gabriel._ Thanks, now all these monkey-see assholes are going to start with it.” He strides over to haul Jack out of the way of the building pile-up that’s forming behind him.

The lab-coated staff person who’s standing closest waves them off to the seats. Leading Jack over to the end of the first row, Gabriel raises his voice to make sure everyone present can hear. “First one of you who tries it, I’ll assume that’s a plea for you to be my next sparring partner.”

Something inside Jack has started singing in anticipation. The rest of him is throwing up a big damn ??? because despite the fairy’s parting words, Jack never expected to see him again, and sure as hell not in a place like this. Jack lets himself be pushed into a chair, then leans over when Gabriel drops down next to him. “How the fuck are you _here?_?”

On the other side of the room, staff members start calling names, matching up the rest of the recruits with their more experienced partners. Chestnut—Gabriel—gives him a slightly manic grin. “I tried out, same as everybody else. Now shush, Jackie. We’re big badass soldiers now. They’re gonna tell you all about this fucked-up hell program you volunteered for. You’ll love it. It’s right up your alley.”

Lighthearted as the words are, Gabriel says them with a finality that leaves Jack feeling shut down. He tries his best to pay attention during the ensuing the orientation, but he can’t shake the sense of being wrong-footed and confused, even when they’re dismissed to have their senior partners show them to their new quarters.

Which, it turns out, he shares with Gabriel. Each of the new recruits is housed with their mentor, who’s supposed to help them adjust.

The orientation schedule keeps them all hopping. It’s not till close to lights-out that Jack finally finds himself sitting on his bed with nothing special left to do besides stare at Gabriel. It occurred to him, sometime during the day, that he doesn’t even know this man...thing...person. They spoke exactly once and it was the weirdest experience of his life. There’s no reason that having him around now should make him feel more at ease or at home. There’s no reason that he should feel gratified by Gabriel’s attention, or snubbed by having it denied him. 

In fact there’s every reason to feel the exact opposite, considering what he is and the way he’s turned up so bizarrely in Jack’s life again. If he had any sense, he should probably be feeling threatened right now.

When Gabriel turns his head, the midnight purple of his true skin gleams in the shadows that play across his face. Those dark eyes still fall on Jack with all the weight of a moment of truth. The heft of them finally brings some stability back into Jack’s head. “So what do you think of your first day, kid?”

He’s not such a kid anymore. He’s 22 and he’s killed people. He’s faced a few moments of truth before, too, but the one he sees in Gabriel’s eyes still feels daunting. He thinks about the things he was told today about the program. The other things he’s heard about it. The fact that Gabriel is here.

“This is going to hurt, isn’t it?” he asks at last.

He hardly needs an answer to that. Special Forces training hurt like hell. He’d eat his own hand if every poor son of a bitch in the program hadn’t thought seriously about giving up at some point. Every new challenge he’s met in the military has been a step up from the one before it, more painful and more exhilarating. Just qualifying for the SEP had him on his knees throwing up from exertion on more than one occasion. And like Special Forces, it sounds like qualifying mainly means the privilege of facing more and harder tests. But then that’s always been the point: you can’t push the limits of your potential if you don’t have the courage to confront them.

But he did all this by himself. He didn’t need wishes or favors or help. That was never what he asked for. The very idea of it makes him bristle. “I don’t need a fucking cheat code,” he snaps when Gabriel steps over to stand in front of him. “If that’s what you’re here for, then you can just leave.”

He closes his eyes when Gabriel settles a hand on his head, hoping he won’t get the answer he’s afraid of.

Instead, Gabriel laughs. “Oh, sunshine. Your window for sending me away came and went a while back.” Fingers card through Jack’s hair. The touch makes his scalp tingle with hyper-awareness.

After a moment, Jack tips his head back to look up at him. “I don’t understand, though. Why _are_ you here?”

He braces to be shut down again. This doesn’t really make any sense. Last time felt like a moment out of time, like stepping out of reality where the rules were different and he could draw boundaries. But this… He reaches out to put a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder, and is unsettled to find he feels entirely real, solid and human.

“Did you do your homework like I told you to?” He might feel human, but he doesn’t look like it right now, or smell like it. It’s not as strong as he remembers from the woods, but this close, that savory, musty smell is still there, along with the scent of ice and wood smoke. He never noticed that before, but then everything smelled like ice and wood smoke when they met.

“I read up,” Jack confirms. “I read a lot.” He means that as a warning. He understands now that he was playing with fire. He still is, but now he knows what he’s doing.  
Gabriel—Chestnut, Jack can’t shake the old name when he looks at him with those spooky moonbeam eyes—smiles like something with fangs, eyes all but crinkling shut into pleased crescents. “Then you know that once we touch something, we never really let it go.” He pauses just long enough to watch Jack’s eyebrows bounce at that thought, then keeps going. “You ever ask yourself what I was doing there that day? That piddly little scrap of woods seem like a place a fairy would go for vacation to you?”

Gabriel is standing between his knees, looming over him half wrapped in shadows and gleams of ghostly white. ‘Chestnut’ is a cute name, and cute doesn’t seem to suit him suddenly. He knew Gabriel could be dangerous, but this is the first time he’s really felt it.

He’s not much for being bullied or intimidated. Jack pushes to his feet and leaves it up to Gabriel whether he wants to give him space or or knock them both down in an embarrassingly hyper-macho heap.

Gabriel laughs and takes a step back, letting his hands fall from Jack’s hair. Instead he tugs him over toward their little bathroom and plants him in front of the mirror. “Here. I want to show you something.”

Gabriel looks a lot more shadowy and moonlit in the mirror, Jack notices. He meets Gabriel’s eyes over his own shoulder.

“So here you are, Jackie. All those stories you read, all those fairytale heroes. You’re one of them now. Have you ever noticed what they all have in common?”

He has no idea. Gabriel is warm against his back. “Uh...the call to destiny?”

Gabriel rolls his eyes. “Oh good, you worked your way down to Joseph Campbell. Forget _The Chosen One’s Starter Kit_ and _look._ ” He grabs Jack’s jaw and turns his head to look himself in the face. 

It’s his face. He’s got no damn idea what he’s supposed to be seeing.

“You haven’t felt normal a day in your life,” Gabriel says. His voice is almost a purr, right against Jack’s ear. Jack’s nostrils flare as something warm and nervous rolls through him. He can see it in the mirror, along with the faint tint of pink in his own cheeks that follows. “You know why? Because you’re not. It’s not ordinary people who get stories written about them, Jack. It’s the ones who’re the right combination of extraordinary and desperate enough to keep running toward the danger.” He drops his chin onto Jack’s shoulder. “You were always going to be something special, sunshine. I could smell it in you the first time I saw you, like the taste of starlight on snow. But I can take you further than you could go alone. That’s why I’m here. To take you as far as you asked to go.”

Jack studies himself in the mirror again, and thinks about how far he wants to go. He wanted to find himself. To find where he really belongs. What he’s really meant to do. The outermost limits of what he can be.

He thinks about the stories he’s read since the last time they met, and what the characters in them went through and accomplished. “That’s pretty fucking far,” he murmurs. His gut clenches in fear and a thrill of anticipation sings through him at the same time.

Gabriel laughs, low and rumbling. His arms wrap around Jack’s waist and pull him back till they’re pressed together. Jack sways back against him, breathless suddenly for so many reasons. “Yeah, it is. Oh, Jack. We’re going to put on a hell of a show.”


End file.
